U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research. A Guide to Evaluating Crime Control of Programs in Public Housing. Washington, DC: Prepared for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development by KRA Corporation; 1997. pp. 4.6-4.8.
Step 3: State your program objectives in measurable terms
Having clearly defined the steps needed to implement the violence prevention activity and identify the short-term and intermediate outcomes, you now need to develop specific criteria-or performance measures-that you will use to determine that the program objectives were achieved. Program objectives include program implementation measures, such as how you will implement your violence prevention activity, as well as the expected result of the activity.
Using our example of tenant security patrols, the outcome of "decreasing violent acts in the housing development" needs to be made more specific. For example, how much of a decrease are you expecting in assaults? In rapes? In murders? The specific goal you define should be realistic, but it should also be indicative of effectiveness. For example, it may be unrealistic to expect that no assaults will occur, but a decrease of only one percent is not an indication of program effectiveness. You can see that such performance measures are subjective. Knowledge of your housing development, the residents, and other community factors will influence how you define the performance measures.
Performance measures of short-term and intermediate goals may differ for the same goal. Again, using the example of tenant security patrols, your short-term goal of decreases in assaults may be 10 percent, but the intermediate goal may be 50 percent based on the assumption that as knowledge of the presence of tenant patrols becomes more widespread, the number of assaults will decrease further. Worksheet 2(a) provides examples of short-term and intermediate performance measures; Worksheet 4-2(b) is a blank worksheet provided for your use.
Defining the outcome objective in measurable terms identifies the information you will need to evaluate your program activity. Note, for example, that whenever you want to measure change, you will need information at two points in time. Chapter 6 discusses collecting information for the evaluation.
[[ insert Worksheet 02(a): Defining Performance Measures and
Worksheet 4 2(b): Defining Performance Measures here]]